Going in for my first LD, not sure how it’s all gonna pan out but hey, should be fun.
Tools of the trade:
That sums that up then I guess, can’t wait to get started. =P
About three hours to go and my own code structure has started burying me alive under a pile of unscalable objects. I’ve got a to a point where adding anything new that needs to be rendered would mean re-writing probably about half of my rendering engine to make it fit in properly without redrawing issues. I really should have gone for an event-driven structure, I dunno how I thought I could’ve gotten away with doing it without. Would’ve made my life so much easier.
Well on the up side, it’s been an absolute blast of fun, and its taught me so much more about the Java language and about writing game engines from scratch. I can, not even 48 hours after starting the programming, think of so many ways I could re-write the code to be more scalable, more efficient, and more lightweight. This is the only problem really, I can do the re-writing, just don’t have the time to get it done for LD. I’ll certainly be taking my experience with this LD as something to learn from in the future.
Good luck to everyone in the voting stages and I’ll hopefully see you around for LD 23.
Screenshots of what it could have been:
And if you’re really somehow interested, here’s the last built jar:
First time In ages I’ve been able to a give a Ludum Dare a shot, something’s always managed to get in the way.
Anyway, after a slightly late start coming up with an idea, I’ve decided to for a sort of top-down hack-and-slash-like game where you play as an evil demon type person defending himself against a horde of those goody-two-shoes guards. I’m keeping the gameplay premise rather simple and going for a sort of timed score-attack type mechanic. The idea being as you defeat more of the innocent guards, you’ll evolve into a more powerful demon with stronger abilities, but you have a set amount of time before the reinforcements appear and the guard spawn rate goes through the roof. If you evolve, then the reinforcement timer will reset and stronger guards will start spawning for your current level. Make it to the final evolution and it’s a case of survive as long as you can before they finish you off and you get your score at the end.
Started off by getting a melee/ranged weapon system in on the player, this made it easier to test and ensure everything was working before I passed it off to the guards to hold.
Once that was sorted, throw together two guard types with the basic chase-the-player AI and some weapon cooldowns and hey presto, the functions of the guards are mostly there.
I don’t plan on giving the player a frequently usable ranged attack if one at all, you’ll mostly be playing melee throwing punches etc. Having a quick ranged attack would kind of make things too easy. Now that the weapon system for the guards is done, time to get the player his new moveset!
It’d be a shame to cone so far and never have anyone play it.